Making Mats For Homeless Out Of Plastic Bags

Each mat takes about 50 hours to make.

Making mats for homeless out of plastic bags.

John the apostle catholic church to create their own mats using about 700 plastic bags apiece. The may 2016 auxiliary magazine featured a follow up to its cucumel s compassionate carpets article it published a few months. Meanwhile in norwalk iowa the mighty mat makers meet once a week at st. In particular plarn can be used as sleeping mats for people.

Gather the plastic bags. Opting to use green canvas bags for your grocery shopping is an effective option but many people still have excess plastic bags lying about the place. Flatten out bags tucking in pleats 2 carefully stack 6 bags use clothes pins to keep them aligned until ready to cut. A word of forewarning when putting out the call to action for collecting plastic bags be prepared for an avalanche of plastic bags.

Rather than throwing them out you can reuse them by crocheting them into multi purpose mats known as plarn plastic yarn. Taking something that will forever sit in a landfill and repurposing it in such a creative way. I read an article where people are making rectangular mats out of plastic bags as well to be used by the homeless for sleep mats during the wet season. I am amazed by the creativity of people.

These sleeping mats make great supplies for the homeless population allowing them to sleep comfortably wherever they need to. Using a quilting ruler or other straight edge that is wider than the bags first trim the bottom seam off the bags then cut strips approximately 1 2 inch 1 cm wide across the width of the stacked bags forming loops. It also makes a great addition to any camping trip. The mats are lightweight waterproof and help keep plastic bags out of oceans and landfills.

The bag ladies as they call themselves also specialize in making large tote bags out of the plastic. This is a great way to involve your local church group knitting or crochet group youth group or scout organization with collecting and sorting the bags. This is a demo video showing you how to take plastic shopping bags and converting them into sleeping mats for the less fortunate. How these women crochet sleeping mats for homeless people out of plastic bags why we wrote this usually plastic bags are solely utilitarian and more and more they re maligned.

Regardless of who uses it it s a great way to recycle. So far they have spent at least 100 hours on the project producing 18 mats that have been handed out to the homeless and there are many more to come. So when i considered making mats for the homeless out of plastic bags and saw that crocheting was the method most widely used to achieve that goal here in america that is where i started.